Guests fill their plates with food at social functions, and typically either hold their plates in cantilever fashion by gripping peripheral edges of the plates, or balance their plates on their laps. If drinks are also served, the guests typically either hold their beverage containers in their other hands, or balance the containers on their plates. Due to the difficulty in performing such balancing, and due to the difficulty of supporting the plates and the containers without food or beverage spillage, guests often seek out a table or like supporting surface, or even the floor, to support their plates and beverage containers. Yet, this action tends to anchor guests to a specific location and prevents the guests from roaming and socializing. In a similar vein, customers of take-out or drive-through restaurants, snackbars, concession stands, and like premises, who are served food on plates and drinks in beverage containers, often find it difficult to support them all without spillage, especially when leaving and carrying the food and drink away from the premises for subsequent consumption at another location, for example, at their homes, in their vehicles, or in their seats at movies, concerts, sporting events, etc.
Another problem resides in the management of accessories such as eating utensils and napkins. Once an individual has been served with food on a plate and a beverage in a container, there is usually no room, or available hand, for holding eating utensils or napkins. Since a food-laden plate is typically held in one hand and a beverage-filled container is typically held in the other hand, the utensils are often stuck directly into the food or placed on top of the food, while the napkin is typically disregarded, or perhaps stuffed in one's pocket, if available. As the individual proceeds from place to place, the jarring from walking sometimes causes the utensils to fall off the plate, in which case the individual is more or less helpless to retrieve them.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,971,613, the art proposed a plate stand to alleviate such problems and to assist users in more comfortably handling food, drinks, eating utensils, and accessories. Although generally satisfactory for its intended purpose, the known plate stand required a separate threaded element to be turned in order to threadedly interconnect a plate and a handheld support. Experience has shown that sometimes the threaded element was prone to being misplaced and becoming lost. Also, a certain mount of dexterity was needed to complete the threaded interconnection. Not all users had this dexterity. Also, the known plate stand required a separate adapter to mount the known plate stand in a compartment of a cupholder that was, for example, provided in a vehicle, or adjacent a seat. This adapter was likewise prone to being misplaced. Accordingly, it would be desirable to alleviate such problems.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and locations of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present disclosure.
The components of the portable food service assemblies have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present disclosure so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.